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Your Father Shoulders You: On Inheriting Paul Celan

JL;DR SUMMARY The recently published collection of letters from Paul Celan to his wife, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, and his son, Eric, illuminates the poet’s struggle to balance the demanding art form with his roles as a father and husband. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

FatherhoodPaul CelanHolocaust PoetryGisèle Celan LestrangeEric CelanLinguistic LegacyLiterary EstatePosthumous LegacyGerman Archives

Places mentioned

Paris, Île-de-France, France
"Now seventy, Eric Celan lives in a modest apartment in Belleville, Paris."
Czernowitz, Braşov, Romania
"Celan, born into a German-speaking Jewish family in Czernowitz, endured the Romanian labor camps."
Hanover, Lower Saxony, Germany
"In 1964, Celan wrote from Hanover: My dear Eric, in a little while I will read poems."
Israel
"In the fall of 1969, Celan gave readings in Jerusalem, Haifa, and Tel Aviv."
Germany
"Finally, in the late 1980s, the German Literature Archive in Marbach made a case that language should be dispositive."
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Cairo Item ID 56988
Cairo Source ID 11
Retrieved 2025-07-16 05:31:01 UTC
Curated 2025-07-16 08:32:46 UTC